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Survey of IPv6 Availability on Commercial Firewalls

ICANN's Security and Stability Advisory Committee (SSAC) is conducting a survey of the commercial firewall market to obtain information relating to IPv6 security service availability. The purpose of this survey is to update and compare the results against a similar survey SSAC conducted in October 2007, see Survey of IPv6 Support Among Commercial Firewalls [SAC 021] [PDF, 236 KB].

Is IPv6 support available from commercial firewalls for all market segments?

Which commonly used security enforcement features can be deployed from commercial firewalls when IPv6 transport is used?

Can an organization enforce a security policy from commercial firewalls when using IPv6 that is commensurate to a policy currently supported when IPv4 is used?

SSAC invites vendors to assist in updating that survey for 2010.

Unlike the 2007 survey, SSAC will also invite business users of commercial firewalls to answer a similar set of questions:

Are user organizations that have adopted IPv6 using commercial firewalls to protect their networks?

What features are user organizations employing when they deploy firewalls in IPv6 networks?

Are user organizations finding that the security services they used at IPv4 firewalls are available for IPv6 transport as well?

Are user organizations satisfied that commercial firewalls can enforce the same security policy whether IPv6 or IPv4 transport is used?

As was the case for the 2007 survey, SSAC will analyze and publish aggregated responses. We will aggregate and analyze vendor results separately from user organization responses. We will compare the 2010 vendor responses against the 2007 responses to measure how availability has changed since the first survey.

Vendors, please consider providing an email address. (We ask you to provide an email address as the final question of the vendor survey.) SSAC will not share this email address but will use it to contact you should we have questions related to survey responses for your products.

User organizations (Businesses).

We are asking persons responsible for the administration (configuration) of the commercial firewalls to participate in the survey. "Businesses" thus includes all non-exclusively personal use commercial firewalls. Small and medium businesses, large corporations, service providers, online merchants, broadband access providers, are all invited to participate. For our purposes, teleworkers and self-employed individuals who use commercial firewalls and administer the firewall themselves are also invited to participate.

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Domain Name System

Internationalized Domain Name ,IDN,"IDNs are domain names that include characters used in the local representation of languages that are not written with the twenty-six letters of the basic Latin alphabet ""a-z"". An IDN can contain Latin letters with diacritical marks, as required by many European languages, or may consist of characters from non-Latin scripts such as Arabic or Chinese. Many languages also use other types of digits than the European ""0-9"". The basic Latin alphabet together with the European-Arabic digits are, for the purpose of domain names, termed ""ASCII characters"" (ASCII = American Standard Code for Information Interchange). These are also included in the broader range of ""Unicode characters"" that provides the basis for IDNs. The ""hostname rule"" requires that all domain names of the type under consideration here are stored in the DNS using only the ASCII characters listed above, with the one further addition of the hyphen ""-"". The Unicode form of an IDN therefore requires special encoding before it is entered into the DNS. The following terminology is used when distinguishing between these forms: A domain name consists of a series of ""labels"" (separated by ""dots""). The ASCII form of an IDN label is termed an ""A-label"". All operations defined in the DNS protocol use A-labels exclusively. The Unicode form, which a user expects to be displayed, is termed a ""U-label"". The difference may be illustrated with the Hindi word for ""test"" — परीका — appearing here as a U-label would (in the Devanagari script). A special form of ""ASCII compatible encoding"" (abbreviated ACE) is applied to this to produce the corresponding A-label: xn--11b5bs1di. A domain name that only includes ASCII letters, digits, and hyphens is termed an ""LDH label"". Although the definitions of A-labels and LDH-labels overlap, a name consisting exclusively of LDH labels, such as""icann.org"" is not an IDN."